The Duke of Wellington hoped that France might be played on, just as in a later day a later Minister seeks to play France in a similar role against a later adversary.[3] [Footnote 3: Sir Edward Grey and the _Entente Cordiale_.] The Mexicans, too, might be induced to invade the Texan frontier.
But a greater infamy than this was seriously planned.

Again it is an Irishman who tells the story and shows us how dearly the English loved their trans-Atlantic "kinsmen" when there was no German menace to threaten nearer home.
Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26th, 1846, to his friend, Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said: "As to the war the Duke[4] says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while France in her present humour and Mexico opens the road to invasion from the South--not to speak of the terrible threat that Napier uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he'd _raise the slave population in the United States_." [Footnote 4: The Duke of Wellington: the report was brought to Lever by the Marquis of Douro, the Duke's heir.] The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpassed.

The brilliant soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous Englishman who conquered Scinde, one of the chief glories of the Britannic hierarchy of soldier-saints.
The Government planning it was that of the late Queen Victoria with the Duke of Wellington's advice, and the people against whom the black-slave millions were to be loosed were the "kith and kin" of those meditating this atrocious form of massacre.

Truly, as an old Irish proverb, old even in the days of Henry VIII.

put it, "the pride of France, the _treason of England_ and the warre of Ireland shall never have end." As a latter day witness of that treason, one who had suffered it from birth to the prison cell, a dead Irishman speaks to us from the grave.
Michael Davitt in a letter to Morrison Davidson on August 2701, 1902, thus summed up in final words what every Irishman feels in his heart: "The idea of being ruled by Englishmen is to me the chief agony of existence.